OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS FOR CAROL BROWNER

Fresh winds are blowing through the hallways at EPA headquarters
in Washington. Or are they?

During her first month on the job, the new head of U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, Carol Browner, has kept her
staff busy defending controversial programs she inherited from
the Reagan/Bush administrations. First she reportedly said she
would ask Congress to relax the Delaney clause, a portion of U.S.
law that prohibits government from approving the addition of
cancer-causing chemicals to processed foods. (See RHWN #324.) The
next day Ms. Browner released a list of 35 farm chemicals she
says the Delaney clause will require her agency to ban, but in
releasing the list she reportedly said EPA "does not believe the
pesticides on the list pose an unreasonable 7risk to public
health." And she reportedly said, EPA has "already banned those
chemicals [pesticides] it considers a risk to humans."[1] The
Delaney clause is a "scientific anachronism," she reportedly
said, presumably meaning that she thinks it's based on outdated
concepts.

Next Ms. Browner sent her scientists, publicists and lawyers to
court in Arkansas, to defend a private company's right to
continue burning dioxin-contaminated chemical warfare agents
(chiefly herbicides from Vietnam) in an incinerator built in a
residential neighborhood of Jacksonville, Ark., even though a
recent study by the federal Centers for Disease Control, released
earlier this month, shows that the past 12 months of burning in
Jacksonville have left measurable residues of 2,4-D (a
cancer-causing herbicide) and dioxin in the bodies of people
living within a mile of the incinerator.[2] Under the Reagan/Bush
administrations, EPA officials stated untruthfully on numerous
occasions that the Jacksonville incinerator could destroy
99.9999% of the chemicals fed into it, as the law required. Ms.
Browner's staff knows this argument will no longer withstand
scientific or public scrutiny, so they turned it around in court,
arguing that the law didn't require them to destroy 99.9999% of
the dioxins or the 2,4-D in Jacksonville. They said the fine
print of the law allowed them to measure other chemicals besides
dioxin and 2,4-D and base their estimates of
destruction-efficiency on those chemicals. (The judge didn't
agree with Ms. Browner's staff, and he shut the incinerator down.)

Ms. Browner then sent a small cadre of scientists to court in
Cleveland, Ohio, to serve as expert witnesses on behalf of Waste
Technologies, Inc. (WTI). Because a memo to Ms. Browner from one
of her staff was leaked to Greenpeace (a plaintiff in the lawsuit
trying to shut down WTI), Ms. Browner's staff were forced to
admit under oath that after Ms. Browner took office on January
20th, EPA conducted a secret risk assessment on the WTI
incinerator. EPA's secret risk assessment revealed that the
incinerator would be 1000 times more dangerous than EPA had
estimated in the risk assessment they released to the public, but
one of Ms. Browner's top staff--William Farland--took the
witness stand to explain why these newly-revealed risks didn't
violate any EPA standards. EPA only has standards for 70 years
of exposure to dioxin, but the new risk assessment covered a
one-year period, so the new risk assessment didn't violate any
EPA standards because EPA doesn't have any relevant standards,
Mr. Farland told the judge.[3] Why Ms. Browner's EPA withheld the
new risk assessment from the public, Mr. Farland did not say.

Within a month of taking office, Ms. Browner appears to have
adopted, or at least defended, the same odious behavior--lies,
deceptions, and coverups--that characterized her predecessor.

But perhaps this is unfair. Perhaps Ms. Browner has been
sandbagged by Republican moles remaining inside her organization.
Perhaps she plans to clean house but has been too busy. In the
meantime, what could she do to restore her credibility?

The Supreme Court of the United States on Monday of this week let
stand an appellate court's decision upholding the Delaney Clause.
Therefore, it is now unmistakably the law of the land that EPA
cannot approve ANY pesticide uses that will leave ANY
cancer-causing residues in processed foods. The Delaney clause
allows ZERO cancer-causing chemicals in processed foods.
Therefore, EPA will be required by law to ban somewhere between
30 and 70 pesticides now in common use because their residues are
measurable in processed foods. The only alternative proposed so
far would require Congress to relax the Delaney clause and
officially allow measurable quantities of pesticides in processed
foods. Risk assessment would be used to establish tolerable
residue limits and the goal of each risk assessment would be to
kill only one out of every million citizens exposed to the
maximum amount of each pesticide on each type of food. This, to
EPA, is an "acceptable" risk.

Such use of risk assessment is already standard practice
throughout EPA. Ms. Browner's predecessor worked tirelessly to
embed risk assessment in every EPA decision, and he generally
succeeded.

Risk assessment for pesticide residues is a four-step process:
(1) Decide how toxic the chemical is; (2) Decide how much the
public will be exposed to; (3) Decide what toxic effects will
occur in exposed people. (4) Establish an amount that will kill
no more than one-in-every-million persons exposed to the maximum
level.

Since it is unethical to conduct experiments on humans, the
toxicity of pesticides is discovered by testing on animals, then
making assumptions about humans. Naturally such tests omit a lot;
a laboratory rat can't say "This makes me feel woozy" or "I 'm
feeling listless and run down" or "I've got muscle aches and
joint pains." Other subtleties may be missed as well: for
example, some chemicals make boy rats act like girl rats. (See
RHWN #290.) In any case, only major changes are detected by
laboratory experiments on animals. Subtle damage usually goes
undetected. So the assessment of toxicity of any chemical always
involves a large measure of uncertainty. WHAT IS UNKNOWN IS
ALWAYS MUCH LARGER THAN WHAT IS KNOWN. In the real world, we can
never know, with anything approaching scientific certainty, what
is a "safe" dose of a poison.

Furthermore, the effect of several chemicals taken together is
never tested for. Yet people in the real world are exposed to
many chemicals simultaneously. According to the National Research
Council, we know that "most crops are treated with more than one
pesticide; and, that fruit and vegetable crops are often treated
with at least three--and sometimes eight or more--pesticides."[4]
Risk assessment simply cannot consider cumulative effects, or
interactions between chemicals.

Risk assessments are based on average exposures of average
people. But, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture,
children ages 1 to 5 eat approximately 6 times as much fruit,
five times as much milk, three and a half times as many grain
products, and approximately twice as much meat and vegetables per
pound of body weight as adult women aged 22-30. EPA itself admits
that children ingest 5 to 14 times more pesticides (per pound of
body weight) than adults do.[5] Yet risk assessments are based on
"average" food consumption. People who don't fit the average,
such as people who eat a lot of strawberries, or Native Americans
in the Northwest, who may eat a lot of fish, are simply not
covered by risk assessments based on average food consumption.

Ethically, risk assessment requires one small group of
individuals (in this case, EPA bureaucrats) to decide what is an
"acceptable" risk for a large group of other people, and even to
decide how many of those other people it is "acceptable" to kill.
We do not recognize this as a form of murder simply because the
victims of this exercise are anonymous. Does the anonymity of a
victim excuse a killing?

As University of Montana biologist Mary O'Brien has said, risk
assessment is scientifically indefensible, ethically repugnant,
and practically inefficient.[6] Faced with a fight over the
Delaney Clause, Carol Browner now has an opportunity to repair
her damaged reputa-tion and make her own positive, distinctive
mark on EPA. She could turn the agency away from risk assessment
and establish a different basis for decision-making: ALTERNATIVES
assessment.[7]

Instead of asking the question that risk assessment asks--"How
much poison can we put in peoples' food and get away with
it?"--we should be asking, "How little poison can we put in
peoples' food and still provide nutritious, attractive, and
affordable meals?" Asked this way, the question opens up a host
of alternative agricultural and marketing techniques, many of
which require no use of poisons at all, or minimal use of
poisons.[8]

A modern approach to regulation of toxic materials, like
pesticides, would require users of toxics every two years to
complete an "alternatives audit," to systematically assess all
alternative ways of accomplishing their stated goals. Instead of
asking how much damage can the planet tolerate, an alternatives
audit asks, how little damage can humans do?
--Peter Montague, Ph.D.